*Sivan Rahav-Meir / The Daily Portion / Giving each person their own Torah portion*
* Translated by Janine Muller Sherr
“Shalom, Sivan, My name is Meir Raff and I’m the principal of a Jewish elementary school in South Africa.
Several years ago, you wrote about a school in Ma’alot in which all the residents of the city finished learning the entire Torah. One of the teachers in our school suggested that we embark on a similar project, so we announced the launch of our 'Mishna Project'.
The project works like this: Each child learns as many Mishnayot as they can in their own time. This not a competition in which the children compete against one other and someone is declared the winner. Each child contributes in his own way: A child in grade one can learn one Mishna, while a child in grade 6 can learn a thousand Mishnayot.
This project has met with tremendous success. Children sit together during recess and after school to study Mishna. They get together on Shabbatot to study together. Parents have told me that their child has asked them to come home early from work so that they can learn together, and they send me pictures of their child sitting in a car or in bed learning another Mishna. All the teachers, even the math teachers, feel that this project has brought about a positive change in the school environment…
Some of the children participating in this project were not the strongest students in their classes, but have become the leaders in Mishna learning, which has raised their self-confidence.
When we initiated this project, our goal was to learn 5,000 Mishnayot, but we quickly surpassed this number and realized that this called for a grand celebration. So we rented a hall, hired a band, and produced a moving event with dancing and certificates awarded to each child. It was such a joyous and moving event—people were crying tears of joy!
This year we will celebrate the successful completion of this project for the third year in a row. Sixty-three children in our little school have learned, altogether 25,678 Mishnayot, which they dedicated to all the Jewish people.
I would like to express my gratitude to you for highlighting this project that has now traveled from the city of Ma’alot in Israel to Johannesburg in South Africa, and I recommend that each one of us — now that we have just celebrated the Festival of the Giving of the Torah — to apply what I learned here as the principal of Yeshiva Maharsha: to make Torah study fun and engaging and give each one of us our own portion in the Torah.”
